Chapter 3 Notes from Animal Farm

Animal Farm Chapter 3

The animals harvest the hay, with everyone helping - the pigs supervise the others as they work, and even the ducks and hens go back and forth in the sun all day carrying tiny wisps of hay in their beaks.

Through the summer and the later corn harvest, everything continues to go well.

"The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master."Chapter 3, pg. 24

Boxer pulls everyone through again and again, doing the work of three horses rolled into one. He gets up half an hour early to do extra volunteer work, and his personal slogan and answer to every problem is "I will work harder!" Chapter 3, pg. 25 The animals work hard, although some, like Mollie and the cat, seem to avoid work.

On Sundays there is no work and after breakfast the animals hoist their flag. Then they have a Meeting to discuss work and proposed resolutions, and Snowball and Napoleon are always the most active in debating resolutions, although they never agree with each other.

The pigs use the harness-room as a headquarters where they study blacksmithing, carpentering and so on from books they find in the farmhouse. Snowball organizes the animals into committees (such as the Wild Comrades' Re-education Committee), which are not very successful, but also organizes reading and writing lessons, which are very successful, particularly with the pigs, dogs, Muriel and Benjamin who all learn to read well.

They find that the stupider animals - like hens, sheep and ducks - cannot learn the Seven Commandments by heart, and so after thinking about it Snowball decides that the Seven Commandments can effectively be reduced to the slogan: "FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD" Chapter 3, pg. 29, and this is written up above the Seven Commandments on the wall of the barn, in bigger letters. The birds object that they have two legs, but Snowball tells them a wing is more like a leg than a hand, because the wing is used for movement and not to manipulate objects. The sheep, hens and ducks then learn this slogan by heart.

Napoleon says it is more important to educate the young than those who are already grown up, and he takes the nine puppies that are born right after the harvest away from their mothers for education, secluding them in a loft until the rest of the farm has pretty much forgotten that they exist.

The animals discover what has been happening to the milk - it all gets mixed into the pigs' mash. As the apples begin to ripen, orders go out that all the windfall apples and the main crop later on are to be reserved for the sole use of the pigs. Even Snowball and Napoleon agree on this - Squealer explains to the other animals that it is necessary for the pigs to eat milk and apples for their health, because they have to do all the brain work and if they fail in their duties Jones will come back.